Aside from Markham, glancing at their wristwatches, were a uniformed superintendent and the inspector from the Branch, detectives and the people who manned the radios and the computers; away in the corner of the (ar-park were the military from Special Forces, denied involvement but permitted stand-by status. They were all out in the rain to see the arrival of the Scottish tracker. The local uniforms would have thought they were be~st equipped to search their own area, had the feel for it. Th.~detectives from London, and the Branch, would have thought they bad the trained surveillance specialists, had the necessary expertise The military would have thought they owned the territory of stalk and track, had the right to crack the problem. They were all interested to see the man dragged out from the north by Five, the man given the job that should have been theirs. Geoff Markham felt an atmosphere around him of acid curiosity edging on malevolence.
The car, big, black and sleek, driven by a chauffeur, swept into the parking area and braked hard. All eyes were on it.
Harry Fenton pushed himself out of the front passenger seat, mischief in his eyes. He called a cheerful greeting to the watchers. It was his show, and that mattered to him. He caught Markham's glance, and there was the slightest, faintest wink of his eye, then he opened the rear door.
The dogs came first. They were squat, scurrying creatures, held by leashes of fodder-bale twine, bright orange. They yapped.
He came after them, wriggled clear of the car.
What Markham had expected was an old man, ruddy and weather-skinned, a man with the lore of the countryside in his face and a lifetime of experience in his eyes.
He was small. He looked barely out of his teens. His visage was pale, and his cheeks and chin were speckled with light stubble. His build was slight, looked as if the wind could blow him away. More than that, he was filthy.
The gathered audience gazed at him with astonishment.
At ten paces Markham could smell the dank dirtiness of his clothes. He wore boots, khaki trousers and a tweed coat, all liberally smeared with mud; Markham thought the coat was a bigger man's cast-off. Its buttons were gone and it was held tight at the narrow waist by the same twine. The man stood beside Fenton and glowered at them.
A titter of laughter rippled behind Markham.
An old man, Markham thought, would have merely ruffled feathers, but this pallid, grimy, stinking youth disjointed noses. The dogs, heaving at their leashes, coughing, had seen a police Alsatian God, and the little verminous bastards would probably try to roger it if they were free but the young man grunted at them, almost inaudibly, and they sat at his boots, their teeth bared. He didn't back off from the laughter but stared back at them. They were, Geoff Markham thought, the most frightening eyes he had ever seen.
From the back seat of the car, the chauffeur was lifting out sheets of newspaper and shaking the mud off them.
Fenton strode to Markham. He said, in a loud voice as if to be certain he was generally heard, 'What a stink. Had the window open all the way down I thought I was going to throw up. Like being shut in a cellar with a well- hung duck. I'd like you to meet Andy Chalmers, Geoff. It's your job to see he goes where he wants to go, has what he wants. I see that his appearance creates amusement. I want to see that amusement wiped off their faces and shoved far up their backsides. Got me? You'll brook no obstruction from any bastard in a clean shirt or I'll break his bloody neck and yours. I've lunch to be getting back to. Keep to the windward of him. Good luck, and good hunting.'
Fenton was gone, without a backward glance. The car swept out of the parking area.
The theatre over, the uniforms, the detectives and the military trooped back into the police station. Geoff Markham thought that if the young man failed it would be Fenton's neck for breaking. As the car disappeared down the road, he realized that no bag had been dumped with the tracker and his dogs.
'Damn, your bag's still in the car.'
'Don't have a bag.'
'Clean clothes and so on.'
'Don't have a bag.'
Markham laughed out loud. Who needed clean socks, who wanted fresh underwear, who had to wash?
'Do you like something to eat?'
'No.'
'Do you want anything?'
'No.'
'What would you like to do?'
'Get there.'
There had once been ambition in Mr. Hackett's ministry, but that was long gone. He existed now in this coastal parish, believing his congregation and his community were beneath his talents, on a diet of godless weddings, hurried funerals and a continuing~nxiety about the maintenance of the fabric of his church. His welcomin1 smile, his proffered friendship were shams. He was lonely, he was better; his wife lived away and the fiction that explained her absence involved her need to care for an elderly, bedridden mother, but she had left him. He lived out his life in the village, kept trouble from his door and the bishop off his back, and waited for retirement, blessed release. The ambition of the Reverend Alastair Hackett, then an inner-city curate on a fast-promotion track, had ended twenty-seven years earlier in the north Welsh mountains when he had taken a party of deprived children, with volunteer helpers, from their Manchester tower blocks for a camping holiday. It was the sort of expedition blessed by bishops, the sort of trip that was good for advancement..' and an eleven-year-old boy had died in a fall. Such a long time ago, but there was no forgiveness in the file that passed from bishop to bishop each time he had applied for subsequent promotion. The file held the muted criticism, unspecified but hinted at, of the police evidence at the subsequent inquest why had the child been alone, why had the child not been better supervised?
His career had never recovered, and the bitterness lingered still. Its target was sometimes the bishops, who did not seem to understand the problems of watching over eighteen hooligan youngsters, but most particularly the police. That bitterness verged on detestation. When he should have been explaining the circumstances of the accident to his bishop, and comforting the bereaved parents, he had been incarcerated in a bare interview room in the police station at Conway, treated like a felon, quizzed relentlessly by men seeming determined to find inconsistencies in his account. The career gone, ambition fallen, he had moved from Manchester to mid-Devon, then taken this Suffolk parish. It was a blighted life, no fault of his own, and empty.
They were in the village. If Geoff Markham spoke, he won a grudging response. If he didn't speak there was silence.
Did he want to go up the church tower, use it as an observation point? A grunt, a shaken head. Did he want to take a look at the house? Again, a similar response.
While he had driven, Chalmers had spread across his knees the map on which a red-ink line marked the trail the police dogs had found, and the riverbank where they had lost it. By Chalmers's boots, the dogs chewed noisily at the car's floor mat. Markham was pretty damn certain that one, maybe both, had peed during the journey.
The smell reeked through the car. He stopped near to the hall, down the road from the green. Chalmers's brow was furrowed in concentration as he studied the detail of the map.
A young woman with a guidebook was sitting on a bench, her back to them. An older woman was coming out of the shop with a wheeled shopping bag. He ignored the slow life of the village around him and busied himself with putting new batteries into the second radio then checked the transmission between the two… Shit, the stress snatched at Markham. Hadn't rung Vicky, and he didn't know the terms of employment offered him. Hadn't spoken to Bill Davies, didn't know whether they were still on their feet or down on the floor. Hadn't remembered the picture. Chalmers eased out of the car, took a little of the smell with him, but not enough. The mat was chewed and puddled and he seemed not to notice. Markham took the picture out of his briefcase, locked the door after him.
'Sorry about that sorry I didn't give it you earlier you should have had it before.'
He didn't know why he should be frightened into abject apologies to this stinking kid. He passed over the picture. It was the first time he had seen anything other than hostility in Chalmers's eyes. He had once been to a boxing match, when he was at college, for a middleweight title. He remembered the first sight of the men when they had come into the ring with the hype blaring over the loudspeakers, and it was supposed to be a grudge match. There had been no hate in their eyes, only respect, and the fight had started. Each had done his bloody
